First Play: Quickfire

Another thing that's been on my mind a few years and I have now gotten to the table; some kind of pre-dreadnought game.

Pre-dreadnought type ships have almost a romantic quality all their own as they fill a relatively short gap between fighting sail and the modern battleship. Having been developed during that turn of the century heyday where discovery and invention seemed to take such frequent leaps in so many directions, the warships of the era abound in differences as theories in engineering and armament are tested, built, then discarded. I think it's why these boats fit so well into the steampunk sort of genre, if you're in to that sort of thing.

I looked into buying ships, but I ended up making my own and I quite like how they turned out. Using drawings downloaded from the-blueprints.com, I looked up ship sizes and scaled the drawings to fit 1:3000 scale on a PowerPoint slide (one can fit a number of ships at that scale on an 8.5 x 11 slide). I cut out and glued the top views of the drawings to popsicle sticks, stacking superstructure portions to roughly match the side view drawings for height. Funnels and masts are made up of metal rods and paperclips, respectively. Large turrets are sawed off ends of bamboo skewers or cut circles from bread tags. The boats are glued to tongue depressors cut at 5cm lengths (luckily, some of these I found in our craft drawers were blue). To finish things off, the ships' names are written on and a little flag glued to the depressor.

Three Japanese battleships. From left: Mikasa, Asahi, Yashima. Not pictured: armoured cruisers, Asama and Tokiwa.

Russian ships. Front to back: battleships Tsesarevich, Retvizan, Potemkin, Rostislav, and protected cruisers Zhemchug and Izumrud. 

The 11 ships mentioned in the above captions are all I've made so far, but I wanted to play with them, so I found a ruleset to use online called Quickfire. It looked like the right mix of detail and quicker play I was looking for. 

Initial setup of my game. Russians on the left, Japanese on the right. At the ship scale and the size of my table, these fleets have just come into range of each other.

I got stat sheets filled out and for the sake of easiness I decided to have the boats start single file with the position and approach angles decided at random. I didn't take many pictures or really keep track of much of the battle, so I don't really have an after action report like I've done with other games. This game would take me about a month to play out as I took a turn or two or three on days I could spare the time.

Although I deliberately chose to start with Japanese and Russian ships, I just randomly picked which ships I made, so the match-up seemed a bit uneven when I got the stats all figured out. Although it was six Russian ships vs. five Japanese, in this game the Japanese cruisers are rated almost as powerfully as the battleships and the Russian cruisers were useless for firing anything but torpedoes (which have a range of only 4 inches and even then rarely hit anything).

Mikasa is set afire early in the game as battleships head right and cruisers go left.

Around turn 7 or so, the Japanese boats seem quite organized. The Russians less so, with their battle ships splitting left and right as the cruisers race through the middle.

It's a close call as Rostislav maneuvers to pass behind the cruisers to join Retvizan.

The ships remaining after turn 20.

End of turn 23. Yashima is the only Japanese ship still afloat, but is adrift. Izumrud has had its speed reduced to where she cannot turn, her ability to launch torpedoes is nil. Rostislav has only her primary weapons operational, but is still in good shape for maneuvering. I ended the game here proclaiming a minor Russian victory.

I keep saying, after playing games like this, that I should be using some kind of moral check. I'd have thought the rules for this game would include something along those lines. Probably would reduce the number of turns in a game like this. As it was, I had no other motive for either side than to shoot each other up and that seemed to take quite a long time. Here's the stat sheets at the end:

Stat sheets used for Quickfire. Pretty simple stuff, considering other games I've played or seen.

It took ten turns to sink the first ship (Tsesarevich). The first two sunk were Russian, it was looking bad for them until Retvizan made an improbable hit on Asahi, triggering blast damage that reduced her speed and started fires that caused even more problems next turn. It was amazing how often Asahi was ablaze before finally sinking at turn 17. Turn 15 saw an amazing torpedo hit on Tokiwa by Izumrud, sinking her that turn. It was the only damage dealt by either Russian cruiser the whole game.

Thoughts on the Rules

I rather enjoy these rules. However, I think I would enjoy them more playing against someone who isn't me. There were times I wonder whether I targeted the right ships in a turn, thinking someone else might have acted differently, but I'd just put that into the downsides of playing solo.

An interesting part of these rules is the division in gunnery and armour. If a ship fires using primary (heavy) guns, the receiving ship uses a heavy armour rating that is compared to attackers heavy gunnery rating to decide the hit value needed. The same ships have different ratings for secondary (light) guns, which are compared against a light armour rating. The variety of ratings and rates of fire of the ships is also interesting.

The firing process is different; one d6 to see if the guns put enough shots in the air to do any damage, then if they do, total two other dice and compare to the value needed to count a hit based on the gunnery/armour comparison (on a chart), on a hit total all three dice and cosult a chart to se if blast damage occurs. I caught on pretty good and found less need to consult the charts later in the game. A cool sounding optional rule is for the player to guess the range, then measure to see if they hit (I didn't do this).

Movement seems scaled well enough, it took about half the game for ships to get into short range (which increases the possibility of blast damage and explosions) and over half the game for any ships to get into torpedo range. Moves at the scale I used are measured in millimeters, the faster ships on my table topping out at 80mm per turn. An optional rule is to double movement, which would get ships into short range and the increased possibility of blast damage quicker, might have to try that.

In any case, Quickfire turned out to be a pretty good game. Building the ships was enjoyable and I think they look good for their simplicity. 

Have fun!